Religious Belief in Democracy

Guest Editorial

When we say we believe in democracy, what exactly are we saying? Is “democracy” a specific list of conditions, or is it more like a feeling? Is the faith that we place in democracy a religious faith?

by Schuyler Lake

The question of whether al-Sistani’s idea for democracy in Iraq is any better than the U.S. coalition proposal, begs a deeper question — what do we mean when we speak of democracy? Democracy is an ancient ideal of wide appeal which has become plastic and ambiguous. Today it is associated with a variety of schemes and ambitions which have little or nothing to do with any specific meaning of the term. I love democracy, you love democracy, Pat Buchanan loves democracy, and I wouldn’t be surprised if Robert Mugabe loves democracy too.

The 18th and 19th centuries were a heyday for democracy. In those times, democracy really earned and deserved its capital D. But even then it was badly mixed up with other ideals like Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, and Prosperity. Then came the horribly bloody, ruinously divisive 20th century, which challenged the validity of all political idealism, democracy included. If one assumes that America came out of WWII morally unscathed, one is sadly mistaken, and has not bothered to heed post-war art. But thanks to our mass media (and a special thanks to Walt Disney), many, if not most Americans now equate democracy with material comfort, security, and even luxury. As if the one were a corollary of the other.

So we have a problem. The problem is not that some interpretation of democracy won’t prove completely valid and practicable, nor that the human longing for true community implicit in the democratic ideal is somehow outmoded, but rather that the word “democracy” itself has been damaged and debased beyond repair. Much as the word “god” has been.

Fred Foldvary’s proposals for a “cellular democracy” in Iraq are brilliant, absolutely brilliant — and might be very effective, were they ever to be implemented. However the chances of that happening are exactly nil. Those who hold power in Iraq (as elsewhere), are jealous of their power. Given the immediacy and the extent of the threats confronting them, both immanent and percieved, they can hardly be blamed for their possessiveness. Fear is their motivating power, ahead of idealism. Meanwhile, George Bush and his corporate bullies are doing all they can to increase the fear factor, rather than diminish it. Anyone who still thinks that Bush’s prime concern is for democracy and freedom needs a lot of strong coffee. In this environment, the ideal of “democracy” becomes not only irrelevant, but positively misleading.

As the ideal of “communism” has also become irrelevant, for the world at large. For better or for worse, and for whatever reason, the days of the Internationale are long gone. We can clearly see the three great Idealisms of the 20th century — Communism, Fascism, and Democracy, in ruins about our feet. Apparently what Western thinkers are doing in response to this dilemma, is abandoning the field to corporate hegemony, and unbridled opportunism. There are disturbing parallells to the Vandals sacking Rome. The executive officers of Halliburton for instance laugh — I mean literally laugh — at the Green Party.

Liberal humanists in general, by adhering to a long-lost, ill-defined, and much-disputed ideal of “democracy”, as if it were their guiding light, have failed to define their actual objectives… objectives which, I contend, are religious in nature rather than political.

What the Progress Report is doing (and doing very well) and what myriad other progressive sites are doing, more or less well, is essentially religious, rather than political in nature. The very idea of open debate and freedom of individual expression is a religious ideal… albeit an open-ended and anti-authoritarian one. I don’t deny that democracy, as a system (or rather various systems) of collecting and tabulating votes, is related to this ideal — but it is not essential to it.

Communism too, was a religious movement, though its god was man-made rather than pre-existing from above. What made Communism religious is the fact that people really believed in it. Lots of people, not just a few. Millions. That’s what made it powerful — the fact that so many people were able to believe in it. It was not the inherent logicalness of Marxism that made it powerful and dangerous, but rather the fact that it was able to harness the hopes of so many humans. It made sense. Communism might indeed have taken over the world, had it not made the essential and disastrous mistake of denying God. But apparently, Communists had no idea that their advocacy for the disadvantaged had anything to do with God. They were so accustomed to fighting the Church/State, so long bitterly opposed to a particular God, and so myopic as to believe that they had invented the idea. Or maybe in many cases, they knew the truth but chose to remain silent.

The remnants of the ideals of democracy today will be able to do no such thing. Neither will the bogus promises of global corporatization, as it rapes the planet for selective benefit, and consigns millions to misery, without recourse to any ideology whatsoever, save that of a victor enjoying its spoils. Innumerable devout Muslims see this world differently — it’s no wonder that they do, and I for one am very glad that they do. They still believe that God (as they percieve Him/Her/It?) has a central place in daily affairs, which is inseparable from politics. Who’s to say that they are wrong, and that the Cheney/Wolfowitz cabal is right? Only a self-serving fool like Bush, or his unthinking “Christian” supporters would presume to make such a judgement, denying Muslims the right to interpret God as they see fit. The fact is, that most neo-religious movements the world over are also neo-fascist. And that all of them implicitly advocate, or at least condone war.

In conclusion: that religion is essential to human community, whether that religion be organized and strictly defined, or not. Also, that “democracy”, no matter how one might define it, is insufficient as a religious ideology for liberal humanism. Even more, it is positively misleading.

Schuyler Lake lives in New Mexico, and has spent much time in Europe and Canada. He works as a painter of houses and “very odd and almost completely unsaleable canvases.” Lake observes that patriotism and a sense of global brotherhood are not at all incompatible.

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3 Responses to Religious Belief in Democracy

(Disclosure: Schuyler Lake is a friend of mine. We play Go on occaison, and I like some of his paintings, and most of his process. I wrote this as a letter to him, after he invited me here to read his essay, but I thought I would share it as well.)

Lake:

I actually re-read “Religion and Democracy” just now. The American Dream version of Democracy posits a state of being, or, rather, a state of Grace that we are to live within, without necessarily having to participate. The Objectfication of Democracy, becomes possible when we cease to realize that democracy is a process, a daily practise, if you will, similiar to the daily practise of a religion. One practises democracy as one practises zen buddhism, with an awareness of each moment of popular intercourse as a microcosm of what we would hope for in the whole. The faith of the democrat, as with the faith of the zen buddhist is in the process itself, not in some Heaven to be achieved like premiums in the cereal box. The prosperity that is likely to accrue to societies that move with awareness towards the stability and equilibrium of fairness for all ought to be a natural side-effect of the process at work, not the goal itself. Just like one might be expected to be a Christian in one’s actions towards others simply because it is the right thing to do, the right process to engage in, rather than for some mythic promise of Heaven and everlasting life, etc, which I, personally, have a hard time swallowing as something to believe in.

I heard Martin Luther King speaking the other day on being the best you can be, even if you are just a streetsweeper, be proud that you are the best streetsweeper that ever sweeped a street, so fine a street swept that any man who passed in that street would look about and say, this street was swept by a Michaelangelo, to paraphrase only a bit. Process as reward unto itself. My Zen teacher says do the best that you can simply because there is no reason not to.

So we are in grave danger of losing whatever remains of our democracy unless we all begin to DO democracy as a daily practise and have faith in that practise, not just observe the holy days and genuflect at the appropriate moments.

Dear Schuyler Lake. I was going to answer to your article Religion and Democracy, proposing to replace the words ‘religion’ and ‘God’ by the ethics of say the 10
Commandments or the Declaration of Human Rights (completed by their obligations)…
But then I read the FOR Statement in Response to Bush’s State of the Union, and found it excellent to complete your article. Please visit http://www.forusa.org

three cheers for Lake..Four cheers for your existence…many many cheers for the vision that brought it into being !! not unlike a draught from an icy stream after a long long walk on a mountain…a Dry mountain at that..

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Arts & Letters

Geonomics is …

a way to have everybody pulling on the same end of the rope. Last summer’s expansive forest fires shed light on growing class resentment in the West. Old log-gers and ranchers rankled at the new urgency to stamp out the blazes that threatened the recent Aspenesque settlers. The newcomers expected working class firemen to make protecting their expensive homes top priority. (Chr Sci Mntr, Spt 7) The tinder for this envy? Rich people moving in bid up the price of land, making it hard to afford by people on the margin. The fault really lies with our system of privatizing land value. If this rising value were collected by land dues and shared by rent dividends – the essence of geonomic policy – who’d complain? The more people move in, the higher the land value, and the fatter the dividend paid to residents. Then people on the margin might go out of their way to invite rich outsiders in.

an economic policy based on the earth’s natural patterns. Eco-systems self-regulate by using feedback loops to keep balance. Can economies do likewise? Why don’t they now produce efficiently and distribute fairly? The answers lie in the money we spend on the earth we use. To attain people/planet harmony, that financial flow from sites and resources must visit each of us. Our agent, government, must collect this natural rent via fees and disburse the collected revenue via dividends. And, it must forgo taxes on homes and earnings, and quit subsidies of either the needy or the greedy. As our steward, government must also collect Ecology Security Deposits, require Restoration Insurance, and auction off the occasional Emissions Permit. And that’s about it – were nature our model.

suitable for framing by Green Parties. When Greens began in Germany two decades ago, they defined themselves as neither left nor right but in front. Geonomics fits that description. The Green Parties have their Four Pillars; geonomists have four ways to apply them:

Ecological Wisdom. Want people to use the eco-system wisely? Charge them Rent and, to end corporate license, add surcharges. To minimize these costs, people will use less Earth.

Nonviolence. Want people to settle disputes nonviolently? Set a good example; don’t levy taxes, which rely on the threat of incarceration, to take people’s money. Try quid pro quo fees and dues.

Social Responsibility. Want people to be responsible for their actions? Don’t make basic choices for them by subsidizing services, addicting them to a caretaker state. Let people spend shares of social surplus.

Grassroots Democracy. Better have grassroots prosperity. Remember, political power follows economic. Pay people a Citizens Dividend; to keep it, they’ll show up at the polls, public hearings, and conventions.

shaped by reality. In the 1980′s, the Swedish government doubled its stock transfer tax. Tax receipts, however, rose only 15%, since traders simply fled to London exchanges. Fearing a further exodus, the Swedish government quickly rescinded the tax altogether. (The New York Times, April 20) That willingness to tax anything leads us astray. Pushing us astray is that unwillingness to pay what we owe: rent for land, our common heritage. Assuming land value is up for grabs, we speculate. We cap the property tax on both land and buildings and the rate at which assessments can go up; while real market values rise quicker, assessments can never catch up. Our stewards, the Bureau of Land Management, routinely sell and lease sites below market value, often to insiders, says the Government Accounting Office. Once we grasp that rent is ours to share, we’ll collect it all, rather than let it enrich a few, and quit taxing earnings, which do belong to the individual earner. That shift is geonomic policy.

a scientific look at how we divvy up the work and the wealth, how some of us end up with too much or too little effort or reward. That’s partly due to Ricardo’s Law of Rent, showing how wasteful use of Earth cuts wages. And it’s partly due to how a society’s elite runs government around like water boys, dishing out subsidies and tax breaks. While geonomists look political reality right in the eye, without blinking, conventional economists flinch. When Paul Volcker, ex-chief of the Federal Reserve, moved on to a cushy professorship at Princeton cum book contract, the crush of deadlines bore down. So Volcker asked a junior associate to help with the book. The guy refused, explaining that giving serious consideration to policy would ruin his academic career. The ex-Fed chief couldn’t believe it and asked the department chair if truly that were the case. That head honcho pondered the question then replied no, not if he only does it once. And economics was AKA political economy!

of interest to Dave Lakhani, President Bold Approach (Mar 8) and Matt Ozga (Jan 29): “I write for the Washington Square News, the student run newspaper out of New York University. Geonomics seems like it has great significance, especially in this area. When was geonomics developed, and by whom?”
About 1982 I began. Two years later, Chilean Dr Manfred Max-Neef offered the term geonomics for Earth-friendly economics. In the mid-80s, a millionaire founded a Geonomics Institute on Middlebury College campus in Vermont re global trade. In the 1990s, CNBC cablecast a show, Geonomics, on world trade as it benefits world traders. My version of geonomics draws heavily from the American Henry George who wrote Progress & Poverty (1879) and won the mayoralty of New York but was denied his victory by Tammany Hall (1886). He in turn got lots from Brits David Ricardo, Adam Smith, and the French physiocrats of the 1700s. My version differs by focusing not on taxation but on the flow of rents for sites, resources, sinks, and government-granted privileges. Forgoing these trillions, we instead tax and subsidize, making waste cheap and sustainability expensive. To quit distorting price, replace taxes with “land dues” and replace subsidies with a Citizens Dividend.
Matt: “This idea of sharing rents sounds, if not explicitly socialist, at least at odds with some capitalist values (only the strong survive & prosper, etc). Is it fair to say that geonomics has some basis in socialist theory?”
A closer descriptor would be Christian. Beyond ethics into praxis, Alaska shares oil rent with residents, and they’re more libertarian than socialist. While individuals provide labor and capital, no one provides land while society generates its value. Rent is not private property but public property. Sharing Rent is predistribution, sharing it before an elite or state has a chance to get and misspend it, like a public REIT (Real Estate Investment Trust) paying dividends to its stakeholders – a perfectly capitalist model. What we should leave untaxed are our sales, salaries, and structures, things we do produce.

an answer for Jonathan of the Green Party (Nov 7): “What does ‘share our surplus’ mean?”Our surplus is the values that society generates synergistically. It’s the money we spend on the nature we use: on land sites, natural resources, EM spectrum, ecosystem services (assimilating pollutants). It’s also the money we pay to holders of government-granted privileges like corporate charters. We could share it by paying for the nature we use and privileges we hold to the public treasury then getting back a fair share of the recovered revenue. Used to be, owners did owe rent (“own” and “owe” used to be one word). And presently, some lucky residents do get back periodic dividends: Alaska’s oil dividend and Aspen Colorado’s housing assistance. Doing that, instead of subsidizing bads while taxing goods, is the essence of geonomics.
Jonathan: “Is local currency what you mean?”
Editor: It’s not. Community currency is a good reform, but every good reform pushes up site values. That makes land an even more tempting object of speculation. Now, any good will eventually do bad by widening the income gap – until you share land values.

the policy that the earth’s natural patterns suggests. Use the eco-system’s self-regulating feedback loops as a model. What then needs changing? Basically, the flow of money spent to own or use Earth (both sites and resources) must visit each of us. Our agent, government, exists to collect this natural rent via fees and to disburse the collected revenue via dividends. Doing this, we could forgo taxes on homes and earnings and subsidies of either the needy or the greedy. For more, see our web site, our pamphlet of the title above, or any of our other lit pieces; ask for our literature list.

what you do when you see economies as part of the ecosystem, following feedback loops and storing up energy. Surplus energy – fat or profit – enables us to produce and reproduce. To recycle society’s surplus, the commonwealth, geonomics would replace taxes with land dues (charged to users of sites and resources, including the EM spectrum, and extra to polluters), and replace subsidies with rent dividends to citizens (a la Alaska’s oil dividend). Without taxes and subsidies to distort them, prices become precise, reflect accurately our costs and values; then, motivated by no more than the bottom line, both producers and consumers make sustainable choices. While no place uses geonomics in its entirety, some places use parts of it, most notably a shift of the property tax off buildings, onto locations. Shifting the property tax drives efficient use of land, in-fills cities, improves the housing stock, makes homes affordable, engenders jobs and investment opportunities, lowers crime, raises civic participation, etc – overall it makes cities more livable. Geonomics – a way to share the bounty of nature and society – is something we can work for locally, globally, and in between.

a study of Earth’s economic worth, of the money we spend on the nature we use, trillions of dollars each year. We spend most to be with our own kind; land value follows population density. Besides nearness to downtowns, we also pay for proximity to good schools, lovely views, soil fertility, etc. These advantages, sellers did not create. So we pay the wrong people for land. Instead, we should pay our neighbors. They generate land’s value and deserve compensation for keeping off ours, as they’d pay us for keeping off theirs. It’s mutual compensation: we’d replace taxes with land dues – a bit like Hong Kong does – and replace subsidies with “rent” dividends to area residents – a bit like Alaska does with oil revenue. Both taxes and subsidies – however fair or not – are costly and distort the prices of the goods taxed and the services subsidized. By replacing them and letting prices become precise, we reveal the real costs of output, the real values of consumers. Then, just by following the bottom line, people can choose to conserve and prosper automatically. A community could start by shifting its property tax off buildings, onto land – a bit like a score of towns in Pennsylvania do; every place that has done it has benefited.

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Thoughts for the Day

When a man wants to murder a tiger he calls it sport; when a tiger wants to murder him he calls it ferocity.

George Bernard Shaw

A banker is a fellow who lends you his umbrella when the sun is shining, but wants it back the minute it begins to rain.

Mark Twain

High achievement always takes place in the framework of high expectation.

Charles Kettering

Kind words do not cost much. Yet they accomplish much.

Blaise Pascal

We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.

Oscar Wilde

The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.

Marcel Proust

If people don’t want to come out to the ball park, nobody’s gonna stop ‘em.

Yogi Berra

In matters of style, swim with the current; in matters of principle, stand like a rock.

Thomas Jefferson

It does not do to dwell on dreams and forget to live.

J. K. Rowling

The equal right of all men and women to the use of land is as clear as their equal right to breathe the air. It is a right proclaimed by the fact of their existence. For we cannot suppose that some men and women have a right to be in this world and others do not.